The 10 Best Articles on Refugees and Migration 3/2018

January 23, 2018

Issues of migration and asylum are at the centre of the political debate in Italy as well as Germany. Meanwhile, the Italian Parliament has approved a new military mission in Niger: nothing new under the Sahelian sun, all part of the wider European strategy of border externalisation. Also: whatever happened to Generation Identity’s anti-immigrant ship; how migrants are still dying in Calais or are left to wander on the streets of Paris; what we can learn from the occupation of the City Plaza Hotel in Athens; Trump’s first year on immigration policy; the returns of Rohingya from Bangladesh to Myanmar, and a new algorithm that could help in the resettlement of refugees.

2. Refugees in Germany, how things are changing

Even in Germany, issues of migration and asylum are at the heart of the political debate. For the first time since 1933, a far-right party has been able to present a draft law in the Reichstag: as, AfD has introduced a bill that would permanently ban refugees withsubsidiary protectionfrom bringing over their close relatives. Asanother article in Deutsche Welle explains, the prospective new coalition between SPD and CDU would limit to 1,000 people per month the number of family reunifications for refugees with limited protection status, while the annual total number of asylum seekers taken in would be capped at between 180,000 and 200,000 per year.

Politics aside, asylum is still a hot topic for Germans. Against this backdrop, the murder of a teenage girl with an Afghan migrant boy as the suspect has put the country’s migration policy on trial: read about it in thearticle by Kathrin Bennhold for the New York Times. Meanwhile, a new study finds that online hate speech has real-world consequences, with an increase in the number of violent attacks against migrants and refugees: read thearticle in the Economist.

5. Calais, where borders kill

Even with closed borders, evacuations, and police raids, migrants continue on their desperate journey across Europe, braving inhuman living conditions and facing mortal dangers in the attempt to reach the UK. Some of them will not make it. Read the reports byAmelia Gentleman in the Guardian on the 15-year-old Afghan killed by a truck near the port of Calais, and byMay Bulman in the Independent on the young man who was hit by a train near Dunkirk and lost both his legs. Also read our ownseries on border deaths.

8. Trump’s first year on immigration policy

In an August 2016 campaign speech in Arizona, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump laid out in ten detailed points the immigration policy he intended to pursue if elected. That speech has proven a remarkably clear roadmap for understanding his priorities since entering the White House. A report from theMigration Policy Institute revisits this ten-point plan, assessing how far the administration has come on each goal since inauguration and considering where its focus may lie in the coming years. Also read thereport by John Holman for Al Jazeera.

10. An algorithm to help find the right place to resettle refugees

There has been a lot of talk about algorithm recently, and not only about Facebook’s new code. Even experts in migrations and asylum are discussing the potential impact of an algorithm for the integration of refugees. A group of researchers are experimenting with machine learning to find a code that helps find the best location to resettle a refugee, improving an individual’s chances of getting a job by as much as 70 per cent. Read thestudy, recently published in Science, as well as thearticle by James Vincent in The Verge (andthe author’s tweet on how the algorithm only seems miraculous because the current systems don’t think about where to send people, for political reasons).